Today, in Scoble’s post, “Missed big HR meeting“, he closes with “Now, let’s get back to work figuring out how to make our customers lives better.”

Well here is some advice for Bob and the gang over at Microsoft from a customer, “Fix what you got before you go trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” and “Eat your own dog food.” There has been one constant theme out of Microsoft Business Solutions since they purchased Great Plains. And that is, “Make everything look like Outlook, don’t worry about broken or half implemented features.”

Here is a hard example. Notes for customers, products, sales orders, you name it, are stored in a single table as a 32K text chunk. There is no revisioning of the notes and if one user accidentally deletes a note by clicking on the wrong poorly named action button the note is gone. Poof it never existed. This has to be one of the most rinky dink set ups I’ve ever seen. Apparently this feature was implemented by a high school intern and since no one in Microsoft Business solutions uses the notes — it’s never been fixed. This architecture bug is so bad and can be so costly, I’ve had to write a specialized “diff” utility to track and keep a revision history for notes. Nothing like blowing a 10K deal because some fscked up and missed an important note that had been inadvertently deleted.

This is just one of many architectural blunders that MS never seems to get around to correcting — I guess if you make it look pretty enough people won’t care that their headed twoards the poor house.

Come on folks, this is an accounting application. An ACCOUNTING APPLICATION not an image editor or a roll-up cube. Boring and reliable is what brings the boat back to port. Fix the issues, then worry about making it look like something it isn’t. I can’t believe that sysadmins at MS don’t lie in wait for these geniuses to go strolling down a dark hall alone.

Google has recently released Google Trends. Google Trends compares different search terms’ usage over time. After reading a post on MDLog about Linux distribution trends I became curious about FreeBSD’s numbers in such a comparison.

So I marched over to distrowatch.com and checked out their Top 10 Linux distributions. They are: Ubuntu, Mandriva, SUSE, Fedora, Debian, Knoppix, Mepis, Gentoo, Slackware, Xandros — in that order.

Google Trends shows that FreeBSD is more popular than: Mandriva, Knoppix, Mepis, Slackware and Xandros. While FreeBSD is enjoying good mind share with respect to Linux, it is also behind Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, Debian and Gentoo in the same comparison. So really this article should be entitled, “FreeBSD more Popular than Some Popular Linux Distributions.”

With FreeBSD’s new focus on the desktop, I believe that the mind share for FreeBSD will be going up once again.

If you haven’t tried FreeBSD lately you are doing yourself a disservice. There are many things to like about FreeBSD.